Tag Archives: valve

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Louis Thompson on 20150923 and was last modified on 20150923 .

In a quick turnaround move, Valve has decided to temporarily end the Paid Mods Feature on Steam Workshop. We’ve previously spoke about it at length and even how Paid Mods might play a role in Valve’s Vision for the Future but perhaps for the best, the company who has been the leader in digital distribution of video games software on the Windows PC, Mac OS X, and Linux platforms has decided that the launch of this feature went so poorly it was best to roll it back. Anyone who purchased a Skyrim Mod will be refunded in full (presumably through Steam Wallet credits though) and Bethesda alongside Valve agree that the critics of the service were right about the way things were being done incorrectly. That being said, Valve hasn’t totally sworn off Paid Mods for life, and more likely than not will find a more acceptable way to introduce them.

Large amounts of protesting helped lead to this decision both in the comments sections of Nexus Mod Manager, Steam itself, and of course the infamous “High Fidelity Horse Genitals” mod being sold for $99.99 alongside other not-so-sincere modding efforts designed to express contempt for Valve’s abrupt transition into allowing Paid Mods for Skyrim. Gabe Newell himself also recently did his due diligence in speaking about the feature in a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” which was mostly met with misunderstanding, trolling, and negative response to the feature. Among the many interesting statements made during that segment was one in particular I found interesting in which Newell described angering the mobs of the Internet as costing more money than the Paid Mods in Skyrim were actually netting Valve in profit.

Valve’s Official Statement to the Gaming Community:

“We’re going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we’ll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

We’ve done this because it’s clear we didn’t understand exactly what we were doing. We’ve been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they’ve been received well. It’s obvious now that this case is different.

To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.

But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim’s workshop. We understand our own game’s communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here.

Now that you’ve backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we’ll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know.”

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Jon Ireson on 20150428 and was last modified on 20150428 .

The community has shown their interest in this game. Valve has reached out to this developer to start moving things toward release on Steam. After over 12,000 Comments, 600 individual discussion threads, and countless up-votes from the gamer community – the once banned game inspired by retro shooter series “Postal” has emerged victorious on its road to publishing through Steam’s Greenlight community feedback voting system.

Official Press Release:

“Release date: Q2 2015

Hatred fills your whole body. You’re sick and tired of humanity’s worthless existence. The only thing that matters is your gun and pure Armageddon that you want to unleash.You will go out for a hunt, you will clear the New York outskirts of the humans with a cold blood. You will shoot, you will hurt, you will kill, you will die. There are no rules, no compassion, no mercy, no point of going back. You are the lord of life and death now and you have the full control over lives of worthless human scum.

You will also run, you will need to think, you will need to hide and fight back when armored forces will come to take you down. You will have no mercy for them, because they dare to come in your way.

Only brutality and destruction can clear this land. Only the killing spree will make you die spectacularly and go to hell.

Features:

– Mad journey into the Antagonist’s hateful mind.
– Isometric shooter with best features of its kind.
– 7 free-roam locations -starting from the outskirts of New York State and ending at…
– Fight against law enforcement (police and stronger forces).
– Gathering equipment off the dead and spreading Armageddon upon society.
– Destroying everything on your way, hunting and fighting back.
– Discovering the plot evolving in a non-linear way.
– Unreal Engine 4 PhysX system boundaries pushed to the limits”

DestructiveCreations’s Workshop

Presents …

Hatred

Development studio’s note: “We’ve had to redo this trailer, cutting out Unreal Engine trademarks and also New York City asked us to cut out NYPD trademarks (we thought it’s a public property, not a registered trademark), so it’s censored now in the video.”

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Mitch Walters on 20141230 and was last modified on 20180323 .

You might not know this, but Hatred (the shooter video game which was pulled from Steam Greenlight yesterday) is actually massively popular already. After reaching #7 in the Top 100 of Steam Greenlight products, it quickly was removed by Valve. Gabe Newell himself has issued a statement on what happened next:

“Yesterday I heard that we were taking Hatred down from Greenlight. Since I wasn’t up to speed, I asked around internally to find out why we had done that. It turns out that it wasn’t a good decision, and we’ll be putting Hatred back up. My apologies to you and your team. Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers.

Good luck with your game.

Gabe”

Here’s what the devs behind the title had to say about it:

“Steam Greenlight campaign for Hatred was shut down after only 11 hours since launch, even though the game was then no #7 among all Steam Greenlight games with over 23,000 up votes. Destructive Creations team received a rather laconic information from Valve about the reasons behind the game removal but accepted it for what it was and thought that pretty much ends the whole story.

Until today when Gabe Newell himself e-mailed Destructive Creations Creative Director Jarosław Zieliński apologizing for the whole thing and bringing back the game to public voting on Steam Greenlight.”

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Jon Ireson on 20141217 and was last modified on 20180323 .

Valve is changing the rules when it comes to Steam gift trading for the better. For the first part it still remains the same – for Direct Gifting , a user can buy a game directly for another user, which they can redeem and start enjoying right away. The change is when a gift is purchased and put into the purchaser’s inventory as an Inventory Gift , that game will now be subject to a (30) thirty day wait before the game is available to trade. Valve is doing this so that trading games can be a much better experience, it also lowers the number of times games are traded then being revoked because the purchaser payment option didn’t work such as a credit card not working properly or fraudulent trades. This seems like the right way to go so that no longer will someone be gifted a game and then it later being revoked since the payment was part of a charge-back scam or the payment didn’t work.

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Josh Ehresmann on 20141127 and was last modified on 20141127 .

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Jon Ireson on 20140403 and was last modified on 20140404 .

Former Valve developers Kim Swift, who is responsible for the hit game Portal and Clint Hocking who is responsible for Splinter Cell and Far Cry 2, are both leaving to join Amazon. This isn’t the first group of developers to leave for Amazon as Double Helix Games (the developers responsible for the newest iteration of Killer Instinct) were acquired this past February.

It seem as if Amazon is taking the whole set top box/game console market very seriously. They’re acquiring many devs from many different studios and game genres so it’s going to be interesting to see the ideas and games the newly acquired talent will come up with. While this is good news we’ll have to wait and see how gamers respond to this new console of sorts. The Fire TV as it’s known was released yesterday and comes with numerous apps both gaming related and entertainment related.

It will be interesting to see where the Fire TV ends up being in a few months time. Do you think it will succeed? Or will it end up suffering the same fast as the Ouya android console? Only time will tell but with the newly acquired talent Amazon seems to be building a strong portfolio of known developers. Let us know what you think in the comments section!

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Brodrick McLaurin on 20140403 and was last modified on 20140403 .

A Facebook spokesperson had denied claims that the Oculus Rift will undergo rebranding, which would have placed the Facebook logo on the device. Based on people’s reactions to the whole deal between Oculus and Facebook, perhaps the dissatisfaction of the possibility of changing it convinced them to modify their plans and leave the logo as is.

However, there are of course those who think this merger is a wonderful idea and will really help virtual reality technology. Chief among them at the moment is VR expert Michael Abrash. He has parted from Valve and gone to Oculus to devote his time and extensive knowledge of virtual reality concepts and designs to the hopes of helping Oculus reach it’s full potential.

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Maggie West on 20140329 and was last modified on 20140329 .

Earlier this week developer Jonathan Biddle of Curve studios relieved via his personal twitter account that he had talked to developers from Valve and they told him that in the next year Steam Greenlight would be removed from Steam (Valve’s Digital Distribution Service) as previously announced by Valve CEO Gabe Newell. Gabe had also stated that a new system would replace Steam Greenlight for a more user interactive system that would allow them to take part in curating games and content as it was previous used only by indie developers. Steam Greenlight was a great service for its time but will its replacement improve what is already great system to discover new and original games on Steam? Will Valve let the users list indie games and other titles that are not available on steam and send confirmation to the developer to then post them on the Steam Store front? Steam fans will have to wait and see but as always check back to RGN for more info on this story as it develops.

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by DJ Killzown Jones on 20140326 and was last modified on 20140326 .

The following analog stick featured prototype controller will be available for press and game developers to check out at the Game Developers Conference 2014 event taking place in San Fransisco next week. Take a look below at the comparison featured images sent over to us by Valve concerning the matter. The following statement was also released:

“Announced during the recently-held Steam Dev Days, the latest version refines ergonomic aspects of the Controller by adding two diamond-patterned button layouts in the area previously designated for a touch screen display. As shown in the attached, these analog buttons are offered in addition to the touch pads featured in the original prototypes.”

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Jon Ireson on 20140314 and was last modified on 20140314 .

Robert Briscoe has made a statement today which echoed the sentiments of a developer who really enjoys the collaborative experience but has grown a business model based on the “small but effective” indie formula currently trending in the industry. After becoming established as the creative mind behind Dear Esther, Briscoe has saw fit to seek obtaining a US Work Visa (which is now approved successfully)and will make the move to Seattle-based game industry headliner Valve Software soon.

Here is a quote from the developer which addresses going to a major company versus remaining indie:

“So I’ve decided I need a break from the solitary life I’ve been living these past years. I think I need to be around people for a while; A lot of my energy and enthusiasm comes from being in the presence of people, sharing different ideas, methods and techniques, different views, outlooks and inspirations, and mostly by just being out of my comfort zone (which I have very much slipped into).”

This move from Valve to take on board a clearly proven indie developer who may or may not have much experience working in groups on AAA games shows their willingness to innovate and take risks betting on the indie community that has time and time again proven themselves to be ahead of the curve with design ideas, work ethic, and creative commitment to originality and fun factor for the end-result product gamers face. Be sure to check out Dear Esther on Steam to support Briscoe during this transitional period if it happens to turn out that you like his game.

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Jon Ireson on 20140313 and was last modified on 20140313 .

Today’s Daily Deal on Steam is Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2. The game, which was offered for free during the Steam Holiday Sale, is now only $4.99. The sale ends on March 10th, so don’t let this opportunity pass by. Could this decrease in price be a prelude to an announcement of the rumored Left 4 Dead 3 release? We can only hope. But until then, enjoy this zombie-shooting game for a considerable discount and try not to alert the horde!

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Maggie West on 20140308 and was last modified on 20140308 .

“On Jan 15-16, 2014, Valve hosted over 1,200 game developers from around the planet at Steam Dev Devs in Seattle, WA. Now Valve has made videos of 28 Steam Dev Days sessions, covering a wide range of game development topics available.”

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Louis Thompson on 20140217 and was last modified on 20140217 .

“On Jan 15-16, 2014, Valve hosted over 1,200 game developers from around the planet at Steam Dev Devs in Seattle, WA. Now Valve has made videos of 28 Steam Dev Days sessions, covering a wide range of game development topics available.”

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Louis Thompson on 20140217 and was last modified on 20140217 .

The Steamworks Features – A Technical Overview presentation from Chris Boyd of Valve for Steam Dev Days Conference is presented below in high definition.

“On Jan 15-16, 2014, Valve hosted over 1,200 game developers from around the planet at Steam Dev Devs in Seattle, WA. Now Valve has made videos of 28 Steam Dev Days sessions, covering a wide range of game development topics available.”

Editor’s Note: RealGamerNewZ has moved web servers, some older posts can no longer be commented on and have been preserved without their images. Thank you for your understanding in this matter. This article was written by Louis Thompson on 20140216 and was last modified on 20140216 .